Ryan: Defeating Obamacare Replacement Would Be 'Momentum Killing'

If Republicans who oppose the Obamacare replacement plan end up defeating the bill, that would be "momentum killing," according to House Speaker Paul Ryan.

"Think of legislation as one train track with a bunch of trains on the track. If you don't get those trains through the system, it slows everything else down,” Ryan said Friday in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.

"This is momentum killing, if we don’t do this and reduce or get rid of the trillion-dollar tax increases in Obamacare. That just puts tax reform a trillion dollars further out of reach," Ryan said.

The Wisconsin Republican laid out the schedule for passing the American Health Care Act:

"If we don’t get this done in time, according to our schedule, and we're planning five weeks over this, this is a five-week process of passing this bill, which is fairly lengthy. It slows absolutely everything down, pushes tax reform off past the summer," Ryan said.

"The last thing we want do is see the entire agenda that we all ran on, that we committed to our constituents we would act on, pushed outside of 2017," the speaker told Hewitt.

If Republicans who oppose the Obamacare replacement plan end up defeating the bill, that would be "momentum killing," according to House Speaker Paul Ryan. "Think of legislation as one train track with a bunch of trains on the track. If you don't get those trains through the...